But it should not be allowed to stand. Fontanes shows us, in a manner made more historically important by the fact that for a long time he was a sort of Minister of Literature to Napoleon, that turning, that transition, which is the subject of this whole chapter. He still, and naturally, has a great deal of the eighteenth century in him; but he can see the vacuity and the frigidity of eighteenth-century “emphasis.” He is responsible[224] for teaching Victor Hugo that Voltaire taught _us_ to admire Shakespeare, one of the most remarkable mare’s-nests in critical history. But, his eyes perhaps sharpened a little by personal friendship, he perceived to a very large extent, if not fully, the importance of the _Génie du Christianisme_. So there may have been mixed motives in his different reception of Madame de Staël’s theories; but there is a singular and satisfactory compound of eighteenth-century good sense and nineteenth-century catholicity in his dealing with her fantasticalities about North and South. He is himself rather rhetorical at times, but seldom to the loss of sobriety; and he is altogether a good sample, a good tell-tale, of the attitude of the inhabitants of a landslip—as we may call it—who see their old marks changing relation and bearing, who do not wholly like it, but who are capable of adapting themselves, at any rate to some extent, to the change. [Sidenote: _Geoffroy._] Another interesting and representative person is Geoffroy,[225] who incurred the strictures of Joubert, and has had them “passed on” by Mr Arnold. Geoffroy—the pillar for many years of the _Année Littéraire_ and of the _Débats_, the “Folliculus” of Luce de Lancival—has received from Gosse (M. Etienne, not Mr Edmund) the praise of having “toujours marché dans la même route et à la lueur du flambeau qu’il avait choisi dès le commencement.” In other words _immutatus et immutabilis_—an attribution magnificent in some relations of life; not, perhaps, as we have before noted, in criticism. Geoffroy’s road and torch might have been better chosen.